Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chiefof Shelter Publications, an independent California publisher.Shelter Publications specializes in books on buildingand architecture,as well as health and fitness.Lloyds latest book is Small Homes: The Right Size.For more info, see: www.shelterpub.comLloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, an independent California publisher. Shelter Publications specializes in books on building and architecture, as well as health and fitness. Lloyd’s latest book is Small Homes: The Right Size.For more info, see: www.shelterpub.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/lloydkahn

They're on about every square foot of the island. Supposedly the great hurricane of 1992, which practically leveled the island, demolished most of the chicken enclosures and they're now everywhere. Pretty soon you get so accustomed to the crowing that it's no bother.

Most of them are the breed known as Red Jungle Fowl.

It wouldn't be difficult — heh-heh —to have barbecued or stewed chicken at any time (pellet gun or snare).

9 comments:

when we lived up in Punaluu Valley (also known as Green Valley) Oahu.........one son brought home a box with a burnt feather hen sitting on a pile of eggs. I said, "those will not hatch after that fire at that house!!". well, sometimes moms are wrong. All 15 of those hatched and were fighting chickens. I always wondered why that son always had money of his own. He used to sell them to folks that did Chicken fighting for money. They are beautiful birds.

They are also crowing in parking lots, hanging out at beaches and flocking in forests.

“They’re absolutely everywhere,” said Eben J. Gering, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University who has been studying these truly free-range birds. “They seem to be living a whole diversity of lifestyles, from eating garbage and cat food to being fed by tourists at the beach to foraging on native arthropods.”

In a paper published last month in the journal Molecular Ecology, Dr. Gering and his colleagues tried to untangle the genetic history of the Kauai feral chickens, which turn out to be not only a curiosity for tourists, but also a window into how humans domesticated wild animals. The reservoir of genetic traits could also prove useful for breeders.

Modern breeds of chickens are, by and large, bigger versions of the red junglefowl, a Southeast Asian cousin of pheasants that was domesticated more than 7,000 years ago. (There also appear to be some genes mixed in from the related gray junglefowl.)

etc etc..

But to my mind, the BIG question is, why are these (free) chickens not in a Sunday Dinner Pot?

The feral chickens of Kauai provide a unique opportunity to study what happens when domesticated animals escape and evolve.Ewen Callaway

20 January 2016

Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.

These modern hybrids inhabit almost every corner of the island, from rugged chasms to KFC car parks. They have clucked their way into local lore and culture and are both beloved and reviled by Kauai's human occupants. Biologists, however, see in the feral animals an improbable experiment in evolution: what happens when chickens go wild?